


Don't Turn the Ship Off

by ImAGiraffacorn



Series: Jonny Has the Worst Aim on the Aurora, Right? [1]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Jonny and Nastya are siblings, Marius shows up near the end and is largely irrelevant i just like him, Nastya gets kidnapped, Nastya gets traumatized a little, The Mechanisms-Typical Violence, cursing, drunk jonny, jonny and nastya sibling dynamic, jonny curses a lot, jonny kills someone, jonny kills the villian, jonny will kill you if you touch nastya, light revisiting of past traumas, lots of cursing and profanity, marius von raum - Freeform, oc villian dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:07:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26452348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImAGiraffacorn/pseuds/ImAGiraffacorn
Summary: “Jonny D’Ville,” the stranger said, face running through an obstacle course of emotions. “I can quite honestly say it is a pleasure to finally meet you face to face.”Jonny isn't entirely sure what he was expecting when he got back to the Aurora, but it definitely wasn't... whatever this is.
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Nastya Rasputina
Series: Jonny Has the Worst Aim on the Aurora, Right? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1922875
Comments: 29
Kudos: 93





	1. Chapter One

“Jonny D’Ville,” the stranger said, face running through an obstacle course of emotions. “I can quite honestly say it is a pleasure to finally meet you face to face.” They had long grey hair pulled back in a low ponytail under a dark hat. The general shape of their body was hidden under a dark trench coat, and their shoes were dark and looked like thick leather. The only thing Jonny could really make out was that they were rather tall, especially by his standards, and there was what looked like a knife scar on their forehead. That must’ve hurt.

“Yeah, uh, who the fuck are you?” Jonny slurred back, face flushed with alcohol and slightly splattered with streaks of blood.

The stranger hummed thoughtfully as Jonny ran into one of the Aurora’s door struts. He fumbled to grab on and hold himself up as the stranger spoke again.

“I don’t know why you would recognize me, but I know you. You killed my brother, shot him clean through the skull and stole his ship. I was an unremarkable nobody on an unremarkable planet at the time, but now I am your ending. I have tracked you my whole life, and now that I have found you, you will never escape me again.” They paused, tilting their head. “I do feel obligated to thank you for giving me a reason to get off my homeworld. Doesn’t mean I don’t hate you, of course, but spending fifty years slowly and carefully tracking one’s prey does allow a certain detachment from such strong emotions as rage and anger.”

“Y’know what else lets you detach your emotions?” Jonny asked far too loudly, reaching towards a flask hooked onto one of his many belts. After a few seconds struggling to unclip the damn thing, he raised it up and downed the mostly-full container in seconds. With a burp, he answered his own question. “This shit. This expensive shit right here. And I’m no lightweight, so that’s a real big tab I just racked up. And I gotta tell you,” he leaned in towards the stranger. “I didn’t pay a single bit of it! S’not the first time I did that either. You’d think they’d stop letting me into the place. I probably owe them a whole ship by now,” he whispered conspiratorially, and burped.

The stranger glared, lips curling into the beginning of a snarl. Whatever emotions they claimed to have detached themself from appeared to be returning in full force. Jonny tried to smile. He loved when he had that effect on people. Unfortunately, he couldn’t figure out how to make his face muscles do the thing and so just ended up looking more drunk than he thought was fair. 

“Follow me,” the stranger ground out between clenched teeth. Turning on their heels, they disappeared into the dark of the Aurora’s loading bay. Jonny stumbled after, vaguely aware that the lights normally weren’t off this time of day. Or night. Whenever he was, the lights should have been on.

“Why’re lights off?” He tried to ask, tongue blundering around the question.

“I thought it better for everyone’s sake if I kept the loading bay in darkness,” the stranger replied crisply. Evidently they had re-detached their emotions now. Jonny frowned. That wouldn’t do.

“Aurora!” He shouted, spinning in a circle and almost throwing up. That  _ also _ wouldn’t do. “Can you turn the lights on down here? Ashes hasn’t cleaned up their new shit and I’m too drunk to deal with this place in the dark!”

There was a brief, painful whirring sound, one Jonny had only heard three times before. The first two times had been when Nastya had been trying to figure out how to power Aurora back on again after Brian had accidentally shut her off completely and almost wiped her memory. The third had been when Raphaella and Tim had gotten into a good old fashioned fistfight and had actually managed to wipe the Aurora’s memory and rebooted the whole ship. Nastya had been very close to launching the two of them into the nearest singularity, and Ivy had only barely managed to talk her down, having just made a backup copy of the ship’s memory two days earlier for the archives. In short, it was not a good whirring sound.

“You turned my ship off!” Jonny shouted, making his own ears ring. “Tha’s not very nice,” he mumbled at a much lower volume.

“Yes, I did.” The stranger began to climb a series of ladders up out of the loading bay. Jonny, not really seeing any other options, followed them up. He fell off the bottom rung three times before he remembered he needed to actually place his foot on the rung to be able to go anywhere.

“Gravity is fucking stupid,” he muttered. Slightly louder, he called up to the figure who had disappeared into the gloom above. “So… why'd’ya turn my ship off?”

“It was necessary.”

“Yeah, but why? Ships don’t work unless they’re on. And as much as Aurora isn’t a normal ship, she still needs to be  _ on _ .”

Jonny emerged from the ladders into the corridor leading down to one of the engine rooms. He couldn’t say for certain, but there were definitely other engine rooms that Nastya had hidden from the rest of the crew. This was the only one he had access to (and also the only one he knew for sure existed, but that was beside the point).

“The engine room? Ugh! Nastya’s gonna kill me if I make a mess in there.”

“Make a mess?”

Jonny smiled and ran into the wall. He really needed to watch where he was walking. “Yeah. See, I’m gonna have to kill you in a minute here. I’m just a little drunk right now, and I  _ really _ don’t want to shoot the wrong thing.”

“The way I hear it, you couldn’t shoot the right thing if your life depended on it,” the stranger almost snorted.

“That’s rude! I can totally shoot well if I need to!”

“Hmm,” the stranger hummed noncommittally. 

“Now can you just answer the damn question? Why’d you turn my ship off?”

The stranger heaved open the door into the engine room and turned back towards Jonny for the first time since entering the Aurora. The light from the emergency panels did little to give Jonny any indication of what they were doing with their face, but if he had to guess, they were probably channeling those unhelpful emotions they had previously detached. A sneer, maybe. Perhaps even a snarl, but he didn’t think he’d been  _ that _ annoying. Not that he wasn’t trying.

“It was the only way to get your engineer to comply with my, well, let’s call them my requests.” Jonny was stone cold sober in an instant, not that the stranger needed to know. “She’s very protective of this old piece of junk, isn’t she?” They disappeared into the heart of the Aurora.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And how in the ever-loving fuck did you get there, Nastya?” he drawled.
> 
> Jonny is far more used to this. Kidnappings happen every other week when they make planetfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I updated the tags a bit to account for the increased angst I accidentally added...

Jonny was not as surprised as he would have liked to be to see Nastya bound and gagged. Nastya was, apparently, very surprised to see Jonny. Once he entered her line of site, she began squirming against the support beam she was tied to and tried to yell through the strip of fabric roughly tied around her mouth.

“And how in the ever-loving fuck did you get there, Nastya?” he drawled.

She stopped writhing, and fixed him with the most rage-filled glare she could manage, followed by more muffled groaning and griping.

“Oh, am I not the knight in shining armor you were hoping for? Did you want Tim instead? Maybe Brian?”

Nastya made a very deliberate sound that Jonny was pretty sure was intended to be a Cyberian curse.

“Nah, thought not. Tim would have managed to be even drunker than I am, and Brian’s been in Boring Mode for like, a decade now. You’d’ve been fucked if either of them got back first.”

Nastya rolled her eyes. Jonny smiled wide and turned to the stranger. “So, uh, thanks for showing me to my engineer. I do rather need her to get my ship back up and running-” He could've sworn Nastya said something about the Aurora not being his ship, but she was gagged, so he could pretend to ignore it. “-and I’d really rather not have to clean up any bloodstains tonight, so you can go now! Hope you die painfully!” The stranger just tilted their head.

“I don’t think you understand, Mr. D’Ville, so I will make myself  _ very _ clear. This ship is not yours, it never has been. As of thirty minutes ago, I have reclaimed it as the property of the Interplanetary Federation under Forfeiture Act 7.65.3390.8-”

“Tha’ was a lot of numbers-”

“-And it will be returned to the Cyberian Navy, it’s rightful owner, upon being thoroughly inspected, reset, and cleared of all traces of it’s previous inhabitants,” the stranger continued, talking over Jonny with a tightening of their face. “You are being brought in under charges of high treason-” Jonny snorted. The stranger glared. Detached emotions, his ass. “-murder, murder of military officers, murder of a general, grand theft starship, destruction of military property, and about twenty other counts I didn’t bother to read.”

“Is that all? I really am off my game as of late-”

“ _ Your engineer _ ,” the stranger practically shouted to be able to cut Jonny off. “Is currently my hostage. Given your own distinct lack of self-preservation, I figured having insurance would be the easiest way for this to happen. If you do anything, and I mean  _ anything _ , to resist arrest, attack me, or otherwise not comply, she gets a full clip to the brain. As long as whatever species you are may live, I doubt that would do any good for your lifespan.” The stranger had pulled out a gun for emphasis, an  _ actual physical bullet-firing gun! _ Jonny was about to just laugh the stranger away right then, until he finally looked back at Nastya.

She had gone white as a sheet, not a hint of silver in her cheeks. Although they locked eyes, Jonny highly doubted she was looking at him. She was terrified and somewhere very far away. He thought back on what the stranger had been saying, having decided it wasn’t worth the effort to focus the first time.

“Did you say Cyberian Navy?” Jonny asked, cutting off whatever the stranger had been talking about now and praying to anything that he had heard wrong.

“Yes,” they ground, teeth clenched. “I did. Now, you are going to power this useless piece of shit back up, and unless you want your engineer here to get a few holes punched through her brain, you are going to quietly go to the brig, where you will remain until your trial on Cyberia. Am. I. Clear?” The stranger stared, eyes cold. Jonny stared back.

After a drawn out silence, Jonny broke first. “Yes.” No. He’d really rather not leave the atmosphere unless absolutely necessary, and even if the stranger did manage to take the Aurora off-world, he had no intention of ever returning to Cyberia, especially with Nastya. He would never let her go back there, not again.

“Lovely,” they smiled, but there was once again no emotion attached. “Now then, we’re in the engine room. Turn the engine on.” And they placed their gun against Nastya’s temple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm here, I'm queer, I'm stressed, and I am pointedly ignoring the numerous papers I'm supposed to be writing in favor of getting this out into the world! I'm also randomly working on a bunch of shorter analytical pieces about some of the Mechs lyrics, so if you're interested in reading my mad ramblings, go check out my tumblr, herding-octokittens!!


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You don’t get to touch Nastya.” His own pistol was in his hand before he even realized.
> 
> Ignoring the fact that she was quite literally immortal, nobody hurts Nastya, not on Jonny's watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marius just kinda jumped in here in the middle, so he is being added as a tag, not a character...

The stranger had made many mistakes leading up to that movement. They had restrained Nastya. They hadn’t realized Jonny was immortal. They had turned off his ship. But that? Threatening Nastya so directly? Trying to bring her back to Cyberia, not even knowing who she was? Holding a fucking gun to her head? That was their final mistake.

“You don’t get to touch Nastya.” His own pistol was in his hand before he even realized.

“Hmm,” the stranger replied with disinterest. “You are an interesting one, no? I thought we had reached a good, solid agreement there. One where no one had to get hurt this early. And yet, here we are.”

“You don’t get to touch Nastya.” He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t have anything else that needed to be said.

“I don’t think you understand, Mr. D’Ville. You are in no position to order me around, or even feign control. You are so drunk you couldn’t operate a ladder. Even on the best of days, you can only ever hit your mark if you hold your weapon directly against them. That’s how you killed my brother, isn’t it? Held the gun right to his head, looked him in the eyes as you pulled the trigger?” They shoved the gun into Nastya’s temple, jostling her. Jonny saw her eyes refocus, and tried to send her a calming look. “Did you even flinch? Did you even  _ fucking _ flinch when you murdered him in cold blood?!? Because I won’t. If you make me kill her, I won’t care. I’ll probably enjoy it, even. Sure, I may lose you, I may lose the ship, but that was only ever a means to an end. If I can make you suffer, if I can make hurt you, then I-”

A single shot rang out in the engine room.

A gun clattered to the ground, covered in the stranger’s gore. They stared at their hand as a steady stream of blood began to fall from the stump where their trigger finger had been moments before. The remains of the finger in question lay in a crimson mess on the ground between the dropped gun and Nastya’s leg, shards of bone poking out and flakes of skin peeling off at odd angles.

“You. Don’t. Touch. Nastya.” Jonny stared into the stranger with as much cold rage and hatred as he could. The stranger was silent, fear etched into every feature.

He fired off two more quick shots to the stranger’s temple, and they fell to the floor, dead.

Jonny exhaled, blinked, holstered his gun. After a brief moment, he turned to untie Nastya. The gag came away relatively easily, but the cuffs were another issue. After a quick minute of cursing and struggling, he managed to pick the lock and helped her stand. Although her wrists were silver and raw, leaking rivulets of mercury along her hands, she was relatively unharmed.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m not dead, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said with a laugh. Jonny winced at the shake in her voice.

“That’s something, I guess.”

“And, um, I’m not going back. We-” She stuttered on a quiet sob. “We’re not going back. So that’s something.”

“No. Never.” Jonny helped her up, and pulled her into a tight hug. Her breaths were short and shuddering, and he squeezed her close. Despite being nearly the same height, Jonny always felt like he was about to be crushed when they embraced. The extra few dozen pounds or so from having a heavy metal for blood would do that for her.

“Brian and Marius would have a field day with them,” he broke the almost-silence after a few minutes. “Means to an end, and all that.” Nastya let out a brief snort against his shoulder, which Jonny considered a win. She had stopped shuddering with each breath, but didn’t seem inclined to release him any time soon. That was fine. He liked her hugs, though he’d never tell the rest of the crew

“Hello? Anyone home?” The call came echoing up from the lower levels of the Aurora. Both Jonny and Nastya jumped. After a brief moment, Nastya sighed with what might have almost been a laugh.

“Up here, Marius,” she called back. “The uh, the primary engine room.”

“Primary?” Jonny asked, pulling away from the hug to give her his most suspicious look possible

“Only. I meant only. The only engine room.”

“Uh huh.”

There was a brief clattering as Marius fumbled around in the hallway outside the “only” engine room, before his face appeared through the door, shadows dancing across his features.

“It is way too dark in here. You do realize the ship is off, right?”

“Yes, we are aware-” Jonny snapped.

“Oh, hi Jonny, didn’t realize you were back. Why is there a body on the floor?”

“What do you mean, you didn’t realize I was back? I sent you a fucking distress call!”

“Did you?” Marius asked with a wink. “I take it that was about the mysterious body bleeding out over the floor here?”

“I will fucking shoot you in the fucking face, right now.” Marius snorted at the threat.

“Oh please, I saw the way you were drinking. You couldn’t hit a dying octokitten if it tried to eat your gun.”

“You can go die in an airlock, Von Raum.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. Body?” Marius gestured to the form on the floor, returning the conversation to the more immediate issue. “Y’know, If you called me just to be the cleanup crew, I will throw myself out of an airlock. Save you the trouble.”

“No, no, I’ll deal with cleanup. Just, take Nastya down to the med bay.”

“Jonny-” Nastya interjected, giving him a strong side-eye.

“Nastya, please. Go to the med bay, let the good doctor take a look at you. I’ll clean the place up and get Aurora turned back on. I’d really like to get off this good-for-nothing moon as soon as possible.” Nastya looked ready to object, glaring. Jonny glared back at her. After a brief but strongly worded conversation using nothing but their eyes, Nastya acquiesced. 

“Fine. Fine. But if you reset her, I will toss  _ you _ out of an airlock.”

“Oh, I know,” Jonny said with a forced smile.

“Alright then. Um, to the medbay!” Marius turned away from the engine room. Halfway to the ladder, he called back over his shoulder, “I haven’t actually restocked anything since ever, cause, y’know, we never actually use the place, but there’s probably something in there to help.”

“Fuck you, Von Raum!” Jonny yelled.

“You wish, D’Ville!” Marius yelled back.

Nastya leaned in and gave Jonny one more quick squeeze before following Marius into the dark hallway. Just as she was about to leave the limited emergency lighting, she turned back. Jonny was leaning over the body, possibly rummaging through their pockets for spare guns or possibly judging how hard it would be to move the body.

“Jonny?”

“Yeah?”

“You just killed them.”

“Um, yes I did, Nastya. That’s kind of what I do. And this one definitely deserved it. Deserved worse, really.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she sighed. “You shot them three times.”

“I know, right? Marius does not appreciate that, bastard. I’m having a good day! Well, except for everything else involving whatever just happened.” Jonny made a vague gesture towards the corpse on the floor. The blood leaking from it’s temple and finger was starting to sizzle on the floor. Even with the ship off, the engine room was still absurdly hot.

“Jonny, please. Stop evading the question.”

“Um-”

“You shot their trigger finger off, and then put two bullets within a centimeter of each other on a falling target. That’s, well that’s not exactly normal.”

“Well-”

“Especially for you. I mean, I always knew you were faking how bad a shot you are, but this was something else. I have never seen you shoot like that. Thousands of years and that’s the first time I’ve ever actually seen you shoot. You just, you hid that from me. And you’re allowed to have secrets, we all are. I just-” Nastya cut herself off. “You know I’m always here for you. You can talk to me about whatever that was.”

Jonny didn’t respond immediately. His face was almost unreadable, but they had not spent a few thousand years pestering each other for her to not know him like the back of her hand. She opened her mouth to say something, to give him an escape, but he finally figured out his thoughts.

“Thank you.” It came out as barely a whisper. “I, um, I don’t know, um, I don’t really want to talk about it, not right now, but thank you.”

“Always, Jonny.” She turned and walked down the corridor, following after Marius’s suspiciously off-key whistling.

Jonny stared after her for a few minutes, mind racing. Finally, he managed to draw himself away from his thoughts and turned back to the body.

He was pretty sure he’d seen the outline of a Labyrinthian knife in one of the stranger’s pockets. Tim had stolen his other one, and he had every intention of stealing it back with an ironic flourish or three.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things!  
> 1) I have ideas and vague plans for one of these for each member of the crew, but those are far in the future. Right now, I'm looking at potentially attempting Mechtober and completely forking my sleep schedule over for the next month!  
> 2) A solid google search has turned up the fact that the average human body has 1.2 to 1.5 gallons of blood, roughly 12-18 pounds/5.5-8 kilos. Assuming Nastya is on the smaller side for a human being and only needs 1.2 gallons of liquid in her veins, her quicksilver blood weighs about 70 pounds/32 kilos. This is not super relevant to the story, but I felt it was fun to know.

**Author's Note:**

> I am well and truly down the rabbit hole here...  
> The rest of this will be coming over the next week, probably. You can also go check out my tumblr, herding-octokittens, where I post literally anything and everything I think about the Mechs with absolutely no filter.
> 
> If you feel there are tags I need to add, please please please message me or comment!


End file.
